PRESS AND MEDIA

9 July 2021

Building Safety Bill Places New Regulator at Heart of Safety

The UK Government published its Building Safety Bill (England & Wales) this week to deliver far-reaching changes to the way high rise high rise residential buildings’ are built and managed.

Published on Monday July 5th, the law will retrospectively give every homeowner an extended claim period under the Defective Premises Act from 6 to 15 years.

In addition, the bill will offer:

• more power to residents and leaseholders on safety issues, with tougher sanctions on industry to hold them to account and ensure people are safer in their homes.
• more redress for homeowners against safety defects through the New Homes Ombudsman
• more rights, powers and protections for residents living in high rise buildings; with building owners accountable to residents and a new regulator

Housing Secretary Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP said ‘This Bill will ensure high standards of safety for people’s homes, and in particular for high rise buildings, with a new regulator providing essential oversight at every stage of a building’s lifecycle, from design, construction, completion to occupation.
The new building safety regime will be a proportionate one, ensuring those buildings requiring remediation are brought to an acceptable standard of safety swiftly, and reassuring the vast majority of residents and leaseholders in those buildings that their homes are safe.’

Download UK gov pdf Explainer

View UK gov new release

‘The new Building Safety Bill brings in a new focus on safety, quality, sustainability and competence for high rise residential buildings. All parties including the Building Safety Regulator will have access to the data on relevant aspects of the building. Our focus within TUV SUD aligns with that ethos, we help our clients define, collate, analyse, and host their data to create the golden thread of information for their building’s / asset’s.’
Dave Peacock – Technical Director – Building Advisory Service
UK BIM Alliance & Golden Thread Initiative (GTI)

‘Developers, project managers, designers, contactors, facility managers should give consideration to safe and efficient means (direct hands-on) of accessing the building envelope specifically during post-handover. Lack of appropriate façade access strategy becomes more of a concern when the system(s) is hired, for example mobile elevated platforms or cranes. Such an approach may meet the access requirements during early years of building occupancy but efficiency may get diminished over the years due to surrounding site conditions ‘retrofitted’ on and around the building without forecasting the knock-on effects to the façade cleaning and maintenance regime.’
Mohammed Merchant – Associate Director – Façade Access

Visit here to find out more about our Building Advisory Services

Visit here to find out more about our Façade Access services